


Fear in a Handful of Xenocytes

by Bonymaloney



Series: Fighting It At Every Turn [15]
Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Arguing, Cowgirl Position, F/M, Love Confessions, Nightmares, Spoilers, Stargazing, The Outer Worlds: Peril on Gorgon DLC, this is the softest thing I’ve written for them and I’m not even sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:22:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26995846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bonymaloney/pseuds/Bonymaloney
Summary: The Captain had laid the marauders to rest. Now her sights were set higher, upon the makers of marauders, and Max whole-heartedly concurred. He had occasionally been given adrenatime himself, in the penitentiary, to enhance interrogation and to expedite his return to work after injury. It had had no permanent effect on his brain chemistry, and he theorised that this was because he was already impulsive and violent.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Series: Fighting It At Every Turn [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1629799
Comments: 21
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

Max’s mother stands at the stove, stirring something delicious and savoury in a big metal pot. His father is sitting with his boots off, enjoying his pipe. They take it in turns to cook, but young Maximillian has the same job every night; to lay the table with knives and sporks, and to pour them each a cup of plain’n’pure water. The kitchen, which is also somehow the galley of the Unreliable - forty years on and he still hasn’t learned to cook, although he is a colony-class expert when it comes to laying the table - is warm and cosy, and if it wasn’t for the marauder Max would be utterly contented. 

The marauder is standing just inside the doorway, just watching. His mother passes back and forth in front of it, fetching a pinch of this, a spoonful of that (a jar of Tartarus sauce, and even in his sleep, Max shudders). It’s like she doesn’t know it’s there, or doesn’t care, and Max is frozen to the spot. He knows, with that strange irrefutable certainty that comes in dreams, that he is the only one who can see the danger, and that as soon as he reacts to it, the marauder will attack. 

He has to stay calm, but his hands are shaking so much it makes the plates he’s holding rattle. He’s been scolded in the past for chipping the enamel, revealing the tin underneath. The marauder looks at him and he looks at the marauder, and Max is horribly certain that it’s smiling, enjoying his helplessness. The kitchen is more like the ship now, and the marauder is taking its helmet off. Max desperately doesn’t want to know what’s underneath, but he can’t look away, and he can’t stand it, can’t stand it, can’t - 

Max awoke with a strangled whooping breath. His chest was so tight it hurt, but then he suddenly understood that it had only been a dream, and he felt shivery with relief. Shivery with cold, too; he’d tied his blanket into a sweat-soaked ball and cast it aside. That in itself was not unusual - he was a vivid dreamer at the best of times - but he was used to the stuffy warmth of the Unreliable. The space around him was unfamiliar, and he sat up, rubbing at his arms where the little hairs were stiffening. He was alone in bed, and lately that was unusual too. 

The Captain liked to earn her bits and then spend them freely, and so she’d taken several rooms on the top floor of the Sprat Shack. Back when they first arrived, and it had felt the way he imagined a vacation might. Before Lucky Montoya’s puzzle had unfolded to reveal the truth of Gorgon, like one of those beautiful plants on Monarch whose petals concealed pods containing gastric acid and small bones.

“Fuck.” His gorge was rising in his throat. Thank the Law for small mercies Ms Holcomb hadn’t been there to see it. Human monsters chasing them through facsimiles of Edgewater and Stellar Bay and countless other frontier towns. They had stayed at their posts long after their masters had abandoned them, an unLawful parody of the worker ideal, still driven by the maddening chemicals that permeated their brains. And the cubes, by strength, the fucking cubes… 

The Captain had laid the marauders to rest. Now her sights were set higher, upon the makers of marauders, and Max whole-heartedly concurred. He had occasionally been given adrenatime himself, in the penitentiary, to enhance interrogation and to expedite his return to work after injury. It had had no permanent effect on his brain chemistry, and he theorised that this was because he was already impulsive and violent. A man who was better - a man who might, say, be able to resist the temptation to kill when faced with a Reginald Chaney - such a man might have been dragged down into chaos; Max was already there. To aspire to Enlightenment had been to rise above his station, he accepted that now. Unlike the Board, who had turned their backs upon the Plan, neglecting their stewardship of the colony in their pursuit of luxury and profit. The marauders, a blight on the corporations, must surely herald them being snapped back into their rightful place. When Max thought of the cubes, he was eager to do some snapping back of his own. 

His resolve soothed him, and he sat in meditation pose on the mattress, sipping at a lukewarm bottle of water. He was calm by the time Pearl slouched back into the room. Her hair draped her shoulders, a dark silky mass, and Max’s fingers twitched without his knowing as he imagined the soft weight of it winding around them. A loose undershirt, tossball lowers that clung to her thick strong thighs, and _fuck_ she would be _warm_...

“Couldn’t sleep either, Captain?”

“Sorry I woke you up,” she murmured. “Go back to bed, I’ll be along soon…”

“You didn’t wake me. As a matter of fact, I suffered quite an unpleasant nightmare.”

Scientism taught that consciousness was a precipitate formed through the interaction of matter, dreams nothing more than a byproduct of the process. But Pearl seemed to set great stock by dreams, liked to discuss them and glean through the contents for insight, and who was Max to deny his Captain. He looked up at her in anticipation. She gazed back at him, but her expression was distressingly vague. 

“Oh. ‘m sorry,” she said again, and Max was taken aback. As he looked closer, he saw her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen in the dim light. Pearl normally stood strong and tall, her posture the same regardless of whether she wore underclothes or armour or nothing at all, and he felt anxiety twist inside him at the sight of her now, made vulnerable by her sorrow. 

Max’s approach to spiritual guidance had always been that he was a 5th back, and doubt and despair were guarding the Thursday zone. And so he took a breath, unclenched his fists and pushed the blanket aside, inviting her to join him on the bed. 

“Sit with me, Captain.”


	2. Chapter 2

Pearl was dazed, her throat tight and her eyes tender. Her knuckles were sore from punching the bathroom wall, until a guy who seemed like he’d maybe eaten some bad spratwurst had yelled at her to stop being so loud. She’d told him it served him fucking right and slunk back to her room, where the sight of Max sitting criss-cross-applesauce, awake despite her best efforts at stealth, sent a fresh stabbing sensation through the numb mass already weighing in her chest.

“You didn’t wake me. As a matter of fact, I suffered quite an unpleasant nightmare.”

He was clearly eager as ever for the prospect of talking about himself, but Pearl couldn't find the words to reply. It wasn’t that her senses were blunted; if anything, they seemed overwhelmingly sharp. She was very aware of the cold of the floor, the harsh industrial lighting dulled dim and intimate by dust. Max’s disappointment, then his concern. She was simply unable to respond, trapped inside her body by a guilt that had grown too heavy to escape; and her knees felt weak as she let herself sink to the mattress beside him. 

The bed was really just a collection of pallets; but it was bigger than the bunk in the Captain's cabin, and she and Max had taken full advantage of that fact. Now, though, the size meant that she could sit and still keep a space between them, wrapping her arms around herself to keep her thoughts inside. 

She could barely look at Max. She’d seen the marks of punishment on his body, and he’d told her about how he’d come by a few of them. Before Chaney’s lie had given him the determination to become a model prisoner and earn his parole, he might have been well on his way toward ‘volunteering’ for Human Inquiry and Auditing. But he could also have ended up in the Hibernation Lab.

The Board had kept them in suspended animation, freezing and unfreezing them in order to perfect the technology of the Lifetime Employment Programme, but Pearl was the one who had killed them. 

Max spoke. 

“What we witnessed today, it was… unsettling. Unleashing marauders upon the colony - it seems there is no end to the Board’s depravity.”

Another twist in her chest - he was comforting her, as though she had any right to be upset after what she’d seen. 

“That’s - that’s not it.”

His hand on her back was large and warm, melting through her resistance to leave her exposed. Pearl took a deep, painful breath and spoke quickly, before her courage failed her. 

“The Equation… the Plan… it says that individuals, individual _people_ , they’re not as important as the good of the whole, right? 

“That is the principle of the thing. Although I find myself wondering… perhaps I’m not as dedicated to my principles as I thought I was.”

“When we were in Byzantium, stealing that dimethyl stuff, whatever… I had a choice, Max. You and Ellie were watching the doors, but it gave me a choice. I could take some of it, or _all_ of it. And if I took all of it, the people in the tubes would die. But I did it anyway.”

Max made a soothing sound, low and rumbling. He put his arm around her shoulders, drew her into his side. 

“Captain… Dr Welles required those chemicals. 70’000 lives are at stake.”

He didn’t understand; his blockheaded certainty that his actions were Planned left him blithely able to justify almost anything. 

“That’s the point - 70’000 maybe’s, over the people dying in pain right in front of me. Hurting real, actual people for some future greater good… how does that make me any better than the Board?”

“Be under no illusion - at the conclusion of the experiments those people would have been killed regardless. Remember the cubes, as if we could ever forget. They were destined to die.”

A spasm of rage passed through her. Anger felt better than guilt, and so she welcomed it. She stiffened in his embrace and pulled away. 

“Shut up about fucking destiny! Just for once, can’t you talk to me like I don’t believe in the Plan?”

“I am in no mood to debate my faith with you!” His hand moved to grasp her chin, forcing her to look at him. She squeezed his wrist tight enough to be a warning, but then paused. Behind the anger in his voice there was pain. She remembered the scorn with which he had dismissed Dr Chartrand’s scruples about human research; and then she remembered the look on his face when he saw the test subjects living quarters at the HIA. 

“It is impossible to change the colony the way you intend without making some hard choices. The Plan has placed you here for that purpose, why can’t you accept that?” Max was glaring at her; but then his voice softened. “Perhaps even find some comfort in it? Your name is clearly underlined in the Equation, when it deems me nothing more than the Architect’s canid, and yet I am content.”

“Like hell are you content. You still want to go to Scylla!”

“To return the stolen book!” Max snapped. With his flushed cheeks and his frown he was the picture of self-righteousness, despite the fact he was clad only in a pair of shorts. Suddenly Pearl was full of tenderness for how ridiculous he was. The tenderness beat the sadness down the way Max himself might beat a raptidon that gave him the side eye; and the sheer relief of it came welling out of her as laughter. 

“That’s what I love about you, Max. Even when you’re tryin to self deprecate. You’re not just any old canid, you’re _the Architect’s_ canid.”

“What I love about you is your stubborn insistence that you’re not following the Plan, when in fact your sense of destiny is utterly plain.”

“I don’t have -“

“You deny the concept of predestination, yes, yes. It is a strange pleasure, hearing your blasphemous opinions and being utterly unable to convince you otherwise.” Max heaved a long suffering sigh, then took her hand. His fingers were thick but delicate and precise as he traced her bones, and she watched him. He kept his head bowed as he spoke. “You reject the Grand Plan, and you do what you do simply because you believe it’s right. The rule of the Board is legitimised by the Plan, and yet they misuse it to justify their own selfish ends. You are… unselfish. That is what makes you better. It makes you…” 

He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, then raised his eyes to gaze at her from under his heavy brows.

“You are irresistible to me, Pearl.”

Her breath caught with a stab of pure sweetness, and her voice sounded strange in her ears. 

“I love you, Max.” 

His eyes lit up, and he lifted his head and grinned. 

“Say it again.”

Her love felt almost too big to contain, and Pearl was certain that it must be visible within her, the way covering a torch with your hand made it glow through your fingers and show your bones. It was vulnerable, and exhilarating. She closed the gap between her and Max and straddled him, burying her fingers in his thick soft hair as she kissed him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and he wrapped his arms around her back, encircling her with his broad shoulders and big hands. Max was always an intense kisser, but the raw emotion behind it now left her so breathless she was light headed. Unshaven since they landed on Gorgon, his beard scratched at her skin, while his soft lips caressed and his tongue claimed her over and over. She could feel his cock, hard and insistent through two layers of clothing, and she wriggled in his lap, grinding down against his stiffness.

Max groaned into her mouth. His hands skimmed her hips then slid upward, deliciously warm against her rib cage. 

“Off,” he gasped, struggling to remove her vest while seemingly not wanting to break contact with her lips, even for a moment. “Please - _fuck_ -take these off…”

Pearl rolled aside and slid out of her lowers, while Max arched his hips and yanked his shorts to his ankles. His cock was thick and flushed and straining, and Pearl felt a low throb of want in her belly. She knelt over him, taking only the very tip and then sliding him back and forth against her most sensitive skin. Her thighs flexed and her breasts bounced; and Max’s eyes were drawn helplessly to her as she teased him with the hot wet promise of more. 

“Please,” he said again, his voice hoarse and almost plaintive. Pearl sank down on him, a moan torn from her throat as she stretched to accommodate him. She was deliciously full, and the pleasure as he gave a languid roll of his hips was almost too much to bear. Oftentimes when she rode him Max would simply lay back with a lazy grin, prop his arms behind his head, and let her pay him the worship and tribute he was so clearly entitled to. But now he pressed his forehead against hers, looking deep and desperate into her eyes as he kissed her. 

“I love you, Captain,” he murmured. Another roll of his hips left her gasping, but he was holding her steady. He was arching eagerly so that he could kiss and bite at her nipples. His hand slipped down her body, pressing firmly against her clit with his thumb. 

Pearl draped her arms around his neck and moved with him, gazing into his eyes as she took her pleasure and gave it back to him. “Love you too, Max,” she breathed, and the look of delight on his face in response was beautiful and somehow utterly innocent, despite the fact he was in her to the hilt. She went faster and he matched her pace, bracing with his hands so he could rut up into her. He was breathing hard and his chest was reddening. 

He tucked his face into her neck, hiding himself from her in an effort to maintain control, but Pearl twined her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck and pulled; and that finished him. She watched his pupils dilate, felt him shudder beneath her. Max groaned, a sweet, broken sound. His face contorted with pleasure and he spilled inside her, his fingers digging into her hips so deeply she thought it might leave bruises. She hoped it would.


	3. Chapter 3

Max lay dazed. He had kissed the salt from his Captain’s lips, fucked her until she forgot her fears. Then at his moment of climax she had pierced him with her eyes as he spent himself inside her, and now everything he was was hers. As a younger man his zeal for the Equation had left Max without the desire or, as some former lovers had accused him, the capacity for emotional intimacy. But as Pearl rested her head on his shoulder and he breathed the scent of her hair, his heart felt so big in his chest that he scarcely had room for breath. 

He didn’t think he slept, but dozed warm and contented, with no concept of the passage of time. Gorgon was too far away from any star to have a sunrise; but at some point it was daytime in Byzantium, and therefore in the rest of the colony too. People’s voices, laughing and joking as they queued for the showers; the clink of plates and cups from the bar area. The rumble and whine of an automechanical, as it set about the thankless, endless task of cleaning the Sprat Shack. 

Pearl shifted in his arms, raised her head to favour him with a drowsy smile. 

“I love watching you sleep,” she murmured huskily. He wondered if she was thirsty. “You always look so mad...”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” she mimicked him. “Ok, Max.”

She pressed a kiss to his clavicle to let him know there was no malice intended, then rolled free of his embrace and stretched with a happy sigh. Regardless of her circumstances, Pearl always gave the impression that she was luxuriating in them, and oh Law, he loved her. 

Scientism held that stability and productivity were key to a successful relationship. Love was pleasantly unnecessary at best, and at worst downright dangerous in its potential for unreason. Max decided that, in his considered opinion, stability and productivity could go fuck themselves. 

The Captain was calm, but there was a wistful tone to her voice, propping herself on her elbow so she could watch him while she talked. 

“I wish we could stay here,” she said. 

“With the marauders and the ice mants and the horrifying abuses of the scientific process?”

“No!” She grinned and swatted vaguely at his flank. “I mean right here, in this room. Just lay in bed and drink sprattails and talk about things…”

Max’s limbs were heavy and warm, and the prospect sounded utterly exquisite. 

“We would never find out what happened to Mr Montoya…” he mused. 

“No. Or where marauders came from. You know we didn’t have those on Earth, right?” He nodded. ”It makes me want to fight the Board even more.”

“On this matter we are of one mind. But I would like… before we leave Gorgon, I would like another chance to look through that big telescope.”

“I’d like that too. Where I used to live, it was always too bright to see any stars. And if it wasn’t bright, it was cloudy. That’s one thing I really love about being out here.”

Max felt oddly moved. “I would like to show you all of the stars in the galaxy.”

“It’s a date, then.” Pearl squeezed his hand. “We’ll help Phineas finish doing… whatever he’s doing, and then we do it. We get a big telescope for the Unreliable, and we’re gonna fly around all the best stargazing spots in the colony. Like that stupid Byzantium tour, only no one’s trying to kill us.”

“Or at least, no more so than usual.”

She laughed. “It’s a date,” she said again. 

Unlike Pearl, Max believed he had a destiny. He’d hoped so fervently to be the man who solved the Grand Equation, but it seemed that his fate lay elsewhere. To return the diary to its original owner, thereby erasing the actions of a greasy sneak thief, might be his contribution to humanity’s enlightenment, and it would be a worthy part in the Plan. As was overthrowing the Board, snapping the leadership of the colony away from personal greed and back toward the path of Lawfulness. But if it turned out that his ultimate destiny was simply to spend his days with his Captain, gazing up at the stars then, at that moment, Max thought he would be utterly content.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line about how much he likes stargazing is possibly my favourite Max line in the whole game. It’s so wistful.
> 
> Thankyou for taking the time to read, I really appreciate it! For anyone that’s interested, this fic takes place in the same setting as my series Fighting It At Every Turn, but I’m not sure the timings quite line up with the quests, so I’ve just made it the last chapter in the series


End file.
